How To Learn Modern Greek

A couple of years ago Johanna Hanink, a classicist at Brown Academy, wrote an first-class essay entitled 'On not knowing (modern) Greek', discussing the fact that very few scholars of ancient Greek ever learn modernistic Greek; the boilerplate classicist studying ancient Greece is more than likely to study French, German language, and/or Italian than to learn the modern language of the state they study. Hanink argues very persuasively that this privileging of other modern European languages over Greek is effectively a continuation of 19th-century colonialist attitudes towards contemporary, as opposed to classical, Greeks:

…why does Modern Greek yet non have a seat at the classicists' table?

This is, bluntly put, largely because our subject area continues to accept a colonialist view of, among other things, Greece, Greeks, and (Mod) Greek. Historians and anthropologists who work on Greece have been much more willing than classicists to acknowledge the country's legacy of metaphorical colonization: not past the Ottomans, only by the early on European antiquaries and travelers who planted their flags in the ruins of Greek antiquity…Viewed through the lens of the present, the people who undertook this more "symbolic" colonization of Greece look a dandy deal like early versions of classicists.

One of the story'south many legacies is that classicists trained in the "Western" classical tradition tend to condone Modernistic Greek as a scholarly language, while Greeks who want to participate in the tradition — to have their voices and ideas heard abroad— earn degrees in other countries and publish their research in English, German, or French. Granting Modern Greek a more valued place in the professional conversation would be a positive step for a field that, on the bespeak of colonialism, has a lot to answer for.

My own path towards first to learn modern Greek, I'1000 afraid to say, fits exactly into this pattern: during my graduate piece of work, French, German, and Italian were the languages I really couldn't get past without reading. Information technology wasn't until after I'd submitted my PhD that I started studying Greek properly, beyond the picayune I'd learned out of phrasebooks – I took a couple of different courses in Cambridge, fix conversations with a tutor based in Athens over Skype (gear up upward via the site Italki, which is a great resource for connecting with language tutors), and finally decided that my Greek wasn't going to improve any more unless I went to Greece and took an intensive course there – hence my contempo trip, in which I took an immersion course (four hours per day, for 3 weeks) at the Athens Centre. Several hours of speaking, reading, writing, and listening to Greek per twenty-four hours – and not just in the classes, but while walking effectually the city – definitely improved my Greek a huge amount. Fifty-fifty if I'thousand learning a linguistic communication primarily to exist able to read scholarship written in information technology (as was the example with German), I've always found that practising speaking a language is the only style I can really get to grips with the grammar so as to be able to read information technology properly, and in this instance my conclusion to learn Greek was at least as much because I wanted to be able to speak to people on my relatively frequent trips to Greece for research and conferences. (I'1000 still more at the 'speaking to people in shops and restaurants' level rather than the 'discussing difficult research issues with colleagues at a conference' level, but it's a start…certainly I'k doing ameliorate than the last time I wrote about attempting to speak to people in Greek!).

And then what'due south it like learning modern Greek every bit a classicist who already knows ancient Greek? Well, for a beginning, y'all become a lot of Looks from your tutor when you don't know the word for something and hope that you might be able to go abroad with merely saying the aboriginal Greek word, only pronounced in modern Greek (the pronunciation is one thing that'due south changed quite a lot). Sometimes the give-and-take is still substantially the same, and it works fine; more often, it produces showtime puzzlement and and so a slightly despairing "αρχαία ελληνικά!" (arhaia ellinika , "ancient Greek!"). Knowing ancient Greek certainly does give you an advantage in some ways – already knowing the alphabet; being able to recognise or guess the meaning of a lot of words; existence familiar with a lot of the grammatical structures, although in that location accept been changes to these as well. Merely as Hanink besides points out, learning modern Greek can help with ancient Greek also:

There's no denying that having to decline Greek nouns when I gild a pizza, or manipulate Greek verbs when I ask the fashion to the swimming pool, has brought fifty-fifty the ancient language to life for me. Afterwards years of studying Modern Greek, I have a far better recall for vocabulary, handle on verb forms, and instinctive sense for accentuation. The time I have defended to Modern Greek is some of the best I have spent equally a classicist, since it has given me a sounder, more internalized sense of the ancient language

Trying to go to grips with grammatical features of modern Greek has definitely helped me to think of similar features in ancient Greek non equally things that people larn in grammer tables, as classicists do, but equally parts of the spoken linguistic communication that people would have used mostly without consciously thinking about it at all – even though I can't quite exercise that yet!

As a linguist, I besides find it interesting – and fun – to trace how the language has changed – not just in the pronunciation, or the grammar, but in the history of private words. Plenty of modern Greek words go direct back to classical Greek words, or can easily be seen to be derived from them – due east.k. the word for a city, πόλη (poli), is nevertheless essentially the same equally ancient πόλις (polis), just with a slightly different grammatical class; whereas the other ancient discussion for city, ἄστυ (astu), isn't normally used now, simply is still found in compounds like αστυνομία (astinomi a, "police": the second part is from νόμος, nomos, 'law') or προαστιακός (proastiakosouth, '"suburban") – and this discussion even goes back as far as the (very) ancient Greek I study, dating from hundreds of years earlier even than classical Greek, with wa-tu = wastu beingness the Mycenaean Greek course of the word, whose history tin therefore be traced over three thousand years.

On the other manus, many words have changed their meaning significantly: Hanink gives the example of αγαθός, agathodue south, which in ancient Greek meant 'expert', merely now ways 'naive' (but as well I never tried to use that one). Many other new words have been borrowed at unlike times from other languages, especially Italian and Turkish due to the occupations of parts of Greece by Venetians and the Ottoman Empire (ane Turkish-derived word I learned in reading a political paper commodity was ρουσφέτι, rousfeti, "a political favour" – in the context of Ottoman court politics, information technology's like shooting fish in a barrel to come across how that one ended up being borrowed, though unfortunate that it's notwithstanding in common use today). Most recently, of course, English has been the source of a lot of borrowed words – I'm particuarly fond of γκουγκλάρω (gouglaro, "I google") and the word my tutor used to describe our task of reading and reporting on a newspaper article, προτζεκτάκι (protzektaki, 'little project' – formed by borrowing the English word and calculation the Greek atomic suffix –aki to information technology. I just call back that'due south very cute, as well as being a squeamish linguistic example of how borrowed words eventually get fully integrated into the borrowing language'south grammar).

Overall, I'm very glad I went to Athens for some intensive language learning – it definitely paid off, although at present that I'm back in the UK I'k going to accept to keep working on speaking/reading Greek so as not to forget it all (and maybe some 24-hour interval I'll manage to become back to the Athens Center again for the side by side level of their course!). Even if you're not a classicist and only go to Greece for embankment holidays, learning merely a little Greek definitely pays off – people are always pleasantly surprised by visitors who brand the effort to speak in Greek, and I hope I've also given something of a sense of how fascinating a language, with such a long history, it really is.